There were many things that blew my socks off at a dinner Sunday night, held in a cozy Brooklyn ground-floor apartment. The basil-ricotta gnocchi was one of them. The lamb pot pies (above) were definitely another. But the one thing that really struck me the most was when, while casually biting off chunks of his garlic sauce-smothered lamb breast and duck fat confit hors d’oeuvres, Tamarack Hollow Farm founder/farmer Mike Betit said, “The first two years [of starting his farm], I lost money. The third year, when I started selling at the NYC Greenmarket, I broke even.”
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What’s more fun than cooking, learning and eating together spectacularly? If you’re someone like me, the answer is nothing. If you’re someone like Michael J. Cirino, founder of the educational workshop and supper club A Razor, A Shiny Knife – no wait, scratch that. There is no one on the planet like Michael J. Cirino. I guarantee you that.
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Look, I tried to make this interview not come off so cheesy. I tried to avoid the corny jokes and snafu of food puns that riddled my last in-depth profile. But seeing as cheese and corn are both main ingredients of Emily’s signature “Seduction” Casserole, Mac and Corn 2.0, the conversation naturally veered off to the deliciously lighthearted. And that’s not such a bad way of describing her just-published cookbook, Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven!.
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This Sunday marks the fourth installment of the sporadic but spectacular home cooking challenge known as the Chili Takedown. Here’s what the event’s honorable chairman had to say about chili, everyone’s favorite late-summer light meal.
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Here’s a project I’m truly proud to have my name attached to: The Neighbors Project. And the nifty new “Bodega Party in a Box” from the non-profit organization’s Food & Liquor store initiative, which aims to put more fresh produce on the shelves of corner stores (aka bodegas). Inside the box, there’s a cookbook filled with bodega-friendly recipes, tips and fun anecdotes from contributors (including the lovely Daisy Martinez, and yours truly) about their favorite bodegas, a silk-screened Baggu reusable shopping bag, a stack of party invitation cards and envelopes, and some flags to deck your pad with.
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In my kitchen, no less! The author of the just-released manifesto for meat lovers, The Shameless Carnivore, Scott Gold paid a trip to my humble ‘hood this weekend for a rather labor-intensive interview. With three squabs in tow, he test-drove a recipe for pigeon pot pie that he’s contributing to a certain casserole cookbook. (These profiles just keep getting better — pretty soon I’m going to have all subjects air-mail me samples of their cooking before we begin. Kidding.)
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It’s November and the end of the warm water surf season, that is, to New York-based surfers like Ben Sargent. To the rest of us average human omnivores with tastebuds that signal richness, warmth, nostalgia and most of all deliciousness, however, it is most certainly the beginning of chowder season. Fortunately for us, Brooklyn’s own Chowder Surfer is here to share both of these high seasons all year ’round. Ben Sargent, self-taught chef, former proprietor of New York’s surf bar Hurricane Hopeful, and star of the only online TV series chronicling the adventures in chowder-making via surfing (or is it the other way around?), was kind enough to chat over a steaming pot of home-cooked chowder for this blog.
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Hey there, lonely cooks: It’s our time to shine. Today, Riverhead releases the anthology, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. Judging from its impressive collection of witty, confessional and highly entertaining stories, the kitchen may just be today’s literary equivalent of what the bedroom was in the 1970’s.
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the cheese blintzes recipe test-drive: practicing and making perfect so that you (hopefully) won’t have to

I’m ecstatic to pick the brain of veteran food critic, cookbook author and food history maven, Arthur Schwartz in this installment of Here’s Lookin’ at You Cook. The Brooklyn-born, bred and based author is not short on answers to all inquiries food-related, having authored books like, “What To Cook When You Think There’s Nothing in the House To Eat” and, most recently, “New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More Than 100 Legendary Recipes,” — an epic study of the city’s rich culinary past and present and a must-read for anyone who thinks they have an opinion about New York food (ahem, bloggers).
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Gosh, this blog can be so one-sided. How sick are you of hearing nonstop touting of the institution of cooking and eating in? Sometimes even I am. Which is why I decided to have a chat on the topic with my good friend Jordan, who once confessed to me a few months after moving into her Brooklyn apartment that she had never “even heated anything up” in it.

Since I’ve surrounded myself with so many incredible foodies and home chefs these past few months, I seem to have fallen out of touch with why cooking doesn’t work for everyone. I know very well some of Jordan’s reasons for not not eating out, like her wickedly busy schedule. But what else is it that separates the one persuasion from the other? I thought it high time to let the opposition speak.
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Maybe “cook” isn’t the right word in this case. This is a truly special installment of Here’s Lookin’ at You Cook (albeit my second), one of a New York exile. As long as I’ve known him (since his jew-fro-sporting high school days), Michael Manning has been a connoisseur of all things delicious. After living in Manhattan for a few years working for NBC, Manning surprised us by doing something that we all should have done: he took an English teaching job in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (aka: the farthest Western desert of China), packed his bags, and hasn’t really come back since. No longer teaching, Manning’s moved on to writing guides for Fodor’s, upkeeping his blog and world’s largest photo gallery of the Xinjiang region on The Opposite End of China, and helping start up a sundried tomato operation as the Vice-President and Quality Manager of Demeter Foods.
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For any of you foodies living in or around Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there’s finally a place where you can go and everybody knows your name. No, it’s not a bar, it’s a kitchenware and specialty foods shop called The Brooklyn Kitchen. I had the pleasure of watching the shop’s first gathering this evening on “A Different Way to Bird”: how to de-bone a turkey, just in time for Thanksgiving. I’ve noticed in magazines and cooking shows how popular this method has become as an alternative to roasting a whole turkey with bones. It takes a bit of skill with the knife, but after a quick informal session like the one The Brooklyn Kitchen offered, pretty much anyone can give it a go.
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For my first Here’s Lookin’ at You Cook profile I had the lucky opportunity of dining with the multi-talented actor, writer, and home chef Bob McClure. You might recognize him from the critically acclaimed online TV show, The Burg, but you might be even more interested in his critically acclaimed family-owned pickle line, McClure’s Pickles.

The kitchen of the well lived-in Williamsburg apartment that Bob shares with a roommate has all the tell-tale signs of tinkering: food processors and blenders of all shapes and sizes line the back of the counter, a wheatgrass juicer is lodged onto an edge of the kitchen table, and not too far away, a tomato plant and sheet of wheatgrass compete for the sun against the kitchen window. Making a presence on everything from the top of the cabinets, cardboard boxes on the floor, and on top of the microwave are jars of pickles at various stages of sourness. Bob claims he is the first family member to experiment with the 50+ year-old family recipe for spicy garlic dills that his great grandmother instilled. He produces a jar of somewhat discolored, though not uncrisp-looking asparagus with cherry peppers and hairy dill submerged in a yellow-green brine as evidence, not yet mature enough to taste. (A previous experiment was one that Bob was fool enough to try–pickles brined with the smallest and hottest of peppers which I cannot for the life of me remember the name of, but that the farmer at the farmer’s market laughed when he purchased more than one.)

the curious asparagus incident

classic spicy garlic wholes with wild dill

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